California Attorney General Jerry Brown on Monday "subpoenaed hundreds of employment, salary, and contract records from the city of Bell and its top officials" as part of a state investigation into the city's extraordinary salaries for top officials, according to an statement from his office.

"These outrageous pay practices are an insult to the hard-working people of Bell and have provoked righteous indignation in California and even across the country," Brown told reporters at a news conference in downtown Los Angeles Monday.

"I'm determined to get to the bottom of these exorbitant payouts and protect the state's pension system against such abuses, and today's subpoenas are an important step in that process," he said.

Brown's office gave Bell city officials 48 hours to turn over the records. The investigation by his office and the state public employee pension fund (CalPERS) comes after the Los Angeles Times revealed a near $800,000 annual salary for the small municipality's city manager and high pay for its chief of police and assistant city manager, all of whom have resigned.

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Dennis Romero is an L.A. Weekly staff writer. He formerly worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Los Angeles Times, where he participated in Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the L.A. riots. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone online, the Guardian and, as a young stringer, the New York Times.